When it came to winning the agreement of Princess Margarethe, Morshead was in his element, showering the family with the vital components of postwar German life—toilet paper, soap, tea, coffee, and matches. As the Landgravine had been given the statutory four-hours’ notice by the American army to quit the hundred-room castle and was now living in the estate manager’s cottage, these supplies were very welcome. In order to assist with the transaction, Morshead decided to bring along the widowed Princess Christoph of Hesse, Princess Sophia of Greece and Denmark and sister of the current Duke of Edinburgh. A favourite of the Landgravine, she was in favour of the transfer of family archives to Windsor Castle.
The princess, together with her children, their pet dog, and a tame wild boar called Bambi, clambered into Morshead’s loaned Rolls-Royce and motored to see the Landgravine. The reunion with her family, the legendary charm of a pair of palace courtiers, and a few bars of chocolate seemed to do the trick, and Landgravine Margarethe signed an agreement for the duo to remove the letters from the castle.
Here it becomes complicated. In an interview with journalist Colin Simpson in 1979, Blunt described how they had gone to the castle to retrieve the papers but were refused access by an American woman officer, Captain Kathleen Nash. She was in nominal control of the castle, which was now a rest-and-recreation club for senior American officers. Now biographer Roland Perry takes up the narrative. In the increasingly terse exchange between the British intelligence officer and the American, Nash felt a frisson of doubt about her initial decision, especially after Blunt, according to Perry, told her that Winston Churchill supported the mission. He insisted that Nash call her headquarters. The female officer, who hailed from Saint Paul, Minnesota, had never met a man like Blunt. As Perry described it: “He was polite yet remote. He behaved as if he had real, if obscure authority.” In the end she phoned headquarters, and while she was otherwise occupied, Morshead and two British privates manhandled packing cases containing the royal letters down the steps from the library, loaded them onto an army truck, and drove off into the night. A similar version is described by authors Martin Allen and John Costello, who add for good measure that the crates of letters removed from the upper floor of the castle (the library is in fact on the ground floor) contained documents chronicling the Duke of Windsor’s treasonous activities.
Espionage expert Chapman Pincher gave the yarn a further twist. When the Americans refused Blunt and Morshead access to the letters, they returned to Princess Margarethe of Hesse, who directed them to a back entrance where, in the dead of night, they were able to break in and make off with their booty. Once back in Britain, Blunt, who had, according to Perry, made a secret microfilm of the incriminating documents about the Duke of Windsor, met his Soviet minder in a seedy East End public house and handed it over for safekeeping. The microfilm dishing the dirt on the duke was his security in case he was ever unmasked.
Author Kenneth D. Alford asserts that the Americans, far from being uncooperative, did all they could to facilitate the visit of the two British VIPs from Buckingham Palace. It was a trip long in the preparation. After the castle was liberated by the Americans on April 19, 1945, Eisenhower received a letter from British general Hastings Ismay—presumably after Lascelles sent his initial request for assistance in July—asking that Queen Victoria’s letters be handed over to Sir Owen Morshead.
Responsibility for working with the British fell on the shoulders of Captain Julius Buchman. He and his men travelled to Kronberg to prepare the royal correspondence and to tidy up the library, which had suffered extensive looting, with visiting GIs stealing family silver, porcelain, and other heirlooms. It was this advance party who, according to Alford, were barred from entering the library by Captain Nash. After speaking with Buchman’s superior officer, Colonel Mason Hammond, the matter was resolved, and Buchman was later issued with an official citation “for tact and industry” in dealing with the chaotic organization in the library. He jokingly told Blunt that he had headed off an international incident, as the Americans were fearful that the British would complain about the state of the castle and its contents. Buchman and Colonel Hammond comprised the greeting party for Blunt and Morshead at Rhein-Main air base, the American duo escorting them to the castle.
On August 6, according to Alford, George VI’s emissaries removed sixty-two volumes of letters between Queen Victoria and the empress dating between 1858 and 1901, together with five further volumes of telegrams between mother and daughter. A year later, American colonel John Allen acknowledged the transfer of documents to Windsor Castle in a memo.
There was no mention of any irregularities. Their visit was so brief that Blunt and Morshead missed other related items, notably Queen Victoria’s gilt-edged Bible and prayer book, a photograph of Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, and nine volumes of correspondence between Empress Frederick and her daughter Princess Viktoria. These were subsequently stolen by American army thieves. In any case, they were on such a tight schedule that they had little opportunity to forage for other material, including the Windsor letters, while annotating the Vicky correspondence. Shortly after they left the rambling castle, for instance, three valuable letters written by Florence Nightingale, the Victorian nurse and philanthropist, were discovered in an unlocked desk drawer by souvenir-hunting American officers.
Shortly after Anthony Blunt—his Soviet code name was variously Tony, Tomson, or Yan—went on his secret military assignment, and Morshead went back to London with the trove of Vicky letters in the hold of the plane, there was a further bizarre chapter in this extraordinary story. Captain Nash, her lover Colonel Jack Durant, and their friend Major David Watson stole the Hessen family’s fabled collection of jewelry, which had been carefully hidden in a special container in the castle basement. They sent it back to America in sealed wooden boxes but were caught a year later. Only two-thirds of the multimillion-dollar booty—as well as more letters from Empress Frederick to her daughter—were ever recovered. Members of the Hesse family, particularly Prince Wolfgang, blamed what the New York Times called “the greatest gem theft in modern times” on the Blunt and Morshead visit, believing that their arrival had excited interest in the castle and its contents.
This is a truly remarkable episode in the chronicles of the House of Windsor, the Blunt-Morshead mission all the more intriguing because they flew to Germany only days after George VI had been told about the existence of the secret German Foreign Office files relating to the duke’s behaviour in the Iberian peninsula. It would have been uppermost in his mind, along with his awareness that the late Duke of Kent had also met with Prince Philipp von Hessen just before the war in the hope of sparking backdoor peace talks. The potential for embarrassment was enormous. Years later, the Sunday Times of London interviewed Prince Wolfgang von Hessen, who confirmed that Prince Philipp was indeed a peace intermediary, via the Duke of Kent, between Hitler and the Duke of Windsor. As the 1979 article stated: “George VI had every reason to believe that the Hessen archives might contain a ‘Windsor file.’”
As Professor Jonathan Petropoulos, the biographer of the von Hessen family, observes: “I not only think there was a concern on the part of George VI and others in and close to the British royal family that damaging letters existed, but I think that such letters existed in 1945.” He points to the continued paucity of papers and correspondence relating to the widely travelled Duke of Kent as further circumstantial evidence that records may well have been destroyed or hidden.
At the very least it would seem that the two trusted courtiers were given a nod and a wink by the king to keep a weather eye out for any other incriminating royal correspondence besides the Vicky letters that might need “safekeeping” at Windsor Castle. The king’s biographer Sarah Bradford believes that to be the case. “He got into such a frightful flap about the Marburg papers and he was really nervous about documentary evidence emerging that Windsor was a traitor.” Certainly the timing and the subsequent reaction of Sir Michael Adean
e, the queen’s private secretary, regarding the limits on the questioning of Blunt suggest an ulterior motive.
As Professor Petropoulos argues: “In all likelihood, Blunt was instructed to keep a lookout for any incriminating documents involving the Duke of Windsor or the royal family. Certain retainers around the royals expressed the belief that there were files in Germany that needed to be secured.”
In short to the age-old question of what did he know and when did he know it, it seems that King George Vl did not know of the discovery of the Windsor file before plans were set in motion to send Blunt and Morshead off to Germany to secure the Vicky letters. Historian Rohan Butler discovered the embarrassing file only on July 17, 1945, and a week later Lascelles was organizing transport to Germany for the two courtiers. Even the most ardent conspiracy theorist would have difficulty in arguing that the Palace knew about the file before they began planning the Vicky operation. That said, it is likely that by August 3, when the two men set off, the king had been alerted by the prime minister to the existence of the file. At the very most, however, the king’s men can only have been told to keep a weather eye out for anything that may be of further interest to the British Crown—their visit was too brief to assume that their purpose was anything other than securing the Vicky letters.
This was not the only mission undertaken on behalf of the king. Later in 1945 Blunt and Morshead made trips to Schloss Marienburg, the German family seat of the Hanoverians, and the Kaiser’s home in Doorn, Holland.
While all the evidence points to there being correspondence between the two royal houses before and possibly during the war, there is little to suggest, then or now, that Blunt or Morshead found it. In fact, when Blunt reported for duty back in London his boss, Guy Liddell, the director of counter-intelligence, briefly noted in his diary: “Anthony has returned from Germany and has brought with him Queen Victoria’s letters to Empress Frederick. They are only on loan.”
The Soviet spy even told his colleague, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, that he had found a letter from a Victorian court official who had called on Karl Marx.
What is indisputable is that the mission to Germany was just one of many undertaken by courtiers on a royal operation staged after the war to mop up correspondence relating to potentially embarrassing episodes. In short, the royal family knew where the bodies were buried and sent their courtiers off to dig them up.
On May 14, just days after the celebration of VE day, Queen Mary summoned the king’s private secretary, Alan Lascelles, to discuss the vexatious matter of letters belonging to her uncle Prince George, Duke of Cambridge. Once considered a possible suitor for Queen Victoria, he led a potentially scandalous life, not for the fact that he was commander in chief of the British army for thirty-nine years but because of his colourful love life.
Unlike Queen Victoria, he was opposed to arranged marriages, believing that they were doomed to failure. Instead he followed his heart, in 1847 marrying actress and servant’s daughter Sarah Fairbrother. During their marriage he followed his heart again, living with a certain Louisa Beauclerk, who was his mistress for more than thirty years. She was the love of his life, Prince George choosing to be buried in the mausoleum in Kensal Green cemetery about sixty feet from Mrs. Beauclerk’s grave. His wife, Sarah Fairbrother, though, is buried with him. It was his boxes of love letters, then deposited in Coutts bank, that greatly concerned Queen Mary. She was worried that these billets-doux could be put to “undesirable” use by the Duke of Cambridge’s descendants. Lascelles was dispatched to make sure the letters never saw light of day.
This was not the only family black sheep to be herded into safer pastures, namely the Royal Archive at Windsor Castle. King George VI was equally vexed about incriminating love letters between Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, and his long-time mistress, Lady Leonie Leslie, aunt to Winston Churchill and a member of one of the largest landowning families in Northern Ireland. For more than thirty years she “ruled the Duchess and ran the Duke,” the vivacious sister of Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, and her husband, Sir John Leslie, accompanying the Connaughts on various official overseas visits. The duke even rented Blayney Castle near to her family seat of Castle Leslie so he could be close to his mistress.
Understandably, the king did not want any more royal dirty linen washed in public. Owen Morshead was asked to approach Lady Leslie’s son, the noted author and poet Shane Leslie, with a view to disposing of the incriminating correspondence. A similar exercise had been undertaken by Lady Patricia Ramsay, the youngest daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, who had destroyed Lady Leslie’s letters to her late father. As Alan Lascelles recorded in his diary entry, made on the day he saw Queen Mary at Windsor Castle: “Perhaps he will gallantly retaliate in kind and set royal minds to rest.”
In fact it was his brother Seymour Leslie who, according to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, presented “several hundred” letters from the duke to Lady Leslie to the Royal Archive at Windsor, where they “remained closed to inspection.” In the papers of Lady Leonie Leslie, which are held by the University of Chicago, there is not one letter between herself and her royal lover, Prince Arthur.
These episodes help explain why authors, journalists, and academics see conspiracies and cover-ups in relation to matters royal. It is often, as with the case of the destruction of the Leslie correspondence, simply because there are.
Not only are relevant archives often inaccessible but, as Lascelles recorded, the royal family, bred with dynastic history in their bones, are instinctively adept at covering their tracks. It is a practice that continues to the present day. Princess Margaret burned several plastic bags of letters written by the late Diana, Princess of Wales, to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Even the queen mother’s official biographer, William Shawcross, was moved to comment: “No doubt Princess Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family. It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint.”
The House of Windsor are not the only culprits: Numerous German royal houses, for obvious reasons, do not allow historians access to family correspondence lest any probings disturb Nazi skeletons that have been hidden in the most secure cupboard in the schloss.
Whatever trove Morshead and Blunt brought back from their visits to Germany, the existence of the Windsor file, which was now in the hands of the Allies, was undeniable. It was a very tricky situation, forcing the king and his senior courtiers to wrestle with the question of how to react and what to do with, in Lascelles’s phrase, a “highly damaging” series of cables and telegrams.
As was often the case in this cosy postwar milieu, palace courtiers instinctively turned to the security services for counsel. After all, the headquarters of MI5 was in St. James’s, only a short walk from Buckingham Palace and the private clubs of Pall Mall. Lascelles was known to consult his friend Guy Liddell on a variety of issues, ranging from discreet background checks on possible palace appointments to informed if unofficial advice on which way the wind was blowing inside Downing Street and other government departments.
On August 24 Lascelles arranged to meet Liddell at his private members’ club in central London in mid-August to chew over the problem. After a convivial dinner, Liddell and Lascelles went to his office in the palace, where Liddell reviewed the embarrassing German Foreign Office telegrams. After reading the incriminating ciphers, Liddell suggested that the guiding hand behind the plot was none other than Charles Bedaux and made the point that the Windsors’ Portuguese host, Dr. Santo Silva, owned a bank well known for transmitting funds to German agents.
“Various statements are attributed to the Duke by these agents which are not of a very savoury kind,” noted Liddell. “Although it seems doubtful whether the Duke was scheming for his own restoration, it is fairly clear that he expressed the view . . . that the whole war was a mistake and that if he had been king it never would have happened.”
Aware of
palace concerns, he promised to have German intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg, then under British control, questioned about the affair and have the telegrams to and from the Silva bank, which were intercepted during the war, investigated. From memory he recalled a “singularly compromising” telegram from Madame Fern Bedaux to the Duchess of Windsor.
He soothed a clearly agitated Lascelles by telling him that in his experience most agents in Spain and Portugal had a tendency to report what they thought their masters wanted to hear and that much may have been lost or changed in the translation.
This may have calmed Lascelles but the king remained concerned about the worrying turn of events. After a meeting with the king at Buckingham Palace, Lord Cadogan noted in his diary of October 25: “King fussed about the Duke of Windsor File and Captured German Documents.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Fight for the File
As the king, prime minister, and foreign secretary wrestled with how to deal with the embarrassing Windsor file, the man at the centre of the drama decided to make an appearance. The Duke of Windsor wrote to the king, whom he had not seen since before the war, and requested an audience at Buckingham Palace in early October. It was not a reunion the king relished, especially knowing the contents of the Windsor file, a subject he did not raise during their meeting.
17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up Page 28